Xhosa Language Translation

Language Translation, Inc. (LTI) is a leading Xhosa translation service. Our professional translators are fully prepared and qualified to fulfill all of your Xhosa translation needs whether it is English to Xhosa translation, Xhosa to English translation, or translating Xhosa with any other language. We consistently deliver true, accurate, and complete Xhosa translations.

Xhosa women engaged in song and dance, two very important components of Xhosa culture http://afreflections.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/singing-ladies-james-burton-xhosa.jpg

We can handle translation projects of all sizes and guarantee the highest quality work at competitive prices. Our 3-step quality assurance process ensures that your documents are translated flawlessly. We only employ translators who are highly trained native speakers of the language into which they are translating. This is particularly critical when you consider that there are 10 vowels, 43 consonants, and 18 click consonants in the Xhosa language, all of which have individual corresponding characters in Latin script. We pride ourselves on our ability to present you with a translation that reads as if it were originally written in the target language.

Xhosa, also known as isiXhosa or Kosa, is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, and it is also spoken natively in Lesotho. Nelson Mandela was probably the best-known speaker of Xhosa in the world. In South Africa, it is spoken mostly in Eastern Cape and Western Cape by members of the amaXhosa and amaBhaca ethnic groups. Xhosa is a member of the Niger-Congo language family, which has descended through Atlantic-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Bantu, Southern Bantu, Nguni, and Zunda. Xhosa is from the southernmost group of Nguni languages, which also contains Swati, Northern Ndebele, and Zulu. Some mutual intelligibility exists with the other Nguni languages, as they all have many linguistic features in common. Nguni languages are themselves a part of the much larger family of Bantu langauges, which means Xhosa is related to many other languages all across Africa.

Xhosa is spoken by roughly 7.9 million people, which is approximately 18 percent of the South African population. As is common with most Bantu languages, Xhosa is a tonal language, which means that the same combination of consonants and vowels can have different meaning when a rise or fall of tone occurs. One of spoken Xhosa’s most peculiar features is the presence of click consonants. The word “Xhosa” itself is initiated by a click. Xhosa's click consonants were most likely derived from the Khoisan languages after a long and extensive history of interactions between the Khosa and Khoisan clans. Xhosa also has a close relationship to Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele, and all four languages are pretty much mutually intelligible.

Xhosa is written with a Latin alphabet which was designed by Christian missionaries in the beginning of the 19th century. The first work of printed Xhosa was a grammar book that was published in 1834. Three letters represent the basic clicks: /c/ for dental clicks, /x/ for lateral clicks, and /q/ for post-alveolar clicks. The tonal features of the language are not represented in the written form.

While Xhosa is the most widely disbursed language in South Africa, Zulu is the most widely spoken. The greatest majority of Xhosa speakers, nearly 5.3 million, live in the Eastern Cape, with another 2 million in the Western Cape. Large numbers of Xhosa native speakers populate Guateng, the Orange Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, North West, Mpumalanga, the North Cape, and Limpopo. A minority of native Xhosa speakers live in Quthing District, Lesotho, Eastern Cape Province, Ciskei and Transkei in South Africa, and also to a lesser degree in Botswana.